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GoG is giving away Postal 2[^] probably one of the most disturbing first person shooter available (you can use a flamethrower to set fire to Gary Coleman in order to get an autographed copy of his book, unless you want to stand in line waiting, or try to collect your pay cheque and buy some milk).
It's rude, it's not even slightly PC, and - yes - it's fun. I bought a copy years ago and completed it several times. I even bought milk once.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Clearly, I've been spoiled playing GTA5 (at 4K no less) as it makes this game look rather dated. Even though it's now well over 4 years old itself and no longer considered cutting edge.
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Yeah, Postal 2 was kinda ugly even when it was new and it hasn't aged gracefully either. On the other hand, it's fantastic where it counts, namely in the gameplay department.
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I've stuck for many, many years with Operation Flashpoint and nothing else. It goes back to 2001, and I must've played it for a full decade. By then it was looking very dated, and by today's standards, it looks laughably bad. But the gameplay...there's nothing else like it. Looking at it, you'd think it's just another shooter, but if that's how to approached the game, you would fail, and rather miserably. This is the game that put an end to first person shooters for me.
The Armed Assault series (aka ARMA) is the follow-up, but there's "something" missing that unfortunately fails at "simply upgrading the graphics", and that's all this game needed. I've never been able to quite put my finger on it.
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Philosopher David Dennet in "Consciousness Explained:" [^]Quote: When I interact with the computer, I have limited access to the events occurring within it. Thanks to the schemes of presentation devised by the programmers, I am treated to an elaborate audiovisual metaphor, an interactive drama acted out on the stage of keyboard, mouse, and screen. I, the User, am subjected to a series of benign illusions: I seem to be able to move the cursor (a powerful and visible servant) to the very place in the computer where I keep my file, and once that I see that the cursor has arrived ‘there’, by pressing a key I get it to retrieve the file, spreading it out on a long scroll that unrolls in front of a window (the screen) at my command. I can make all sorts of things happen inside the computer by typing in various commands, pressing various buttons, and I don’t have to know the details; I maintain control by relying on my understanding of the detailed audiovisual metaphors provided by the User illusion.
For every person who experiences interaction with the computer as a compelling illusion, there is a programmer for whom users are illusions, and there is a program manager for whom programmers are illusions 
More seriously, I think this omits the extent to which GUI skeuomorphism [^] (less fashionable since 1990) "anchors" the users' subjective experience to the functionality of "real-world things" ... a desk, a file cabinet, a ledger, etc. I keep waiting for the "killer" synthesis of voice recognition and (hands free) gesture recognition, and the whole hypothetical AI "bonanza."
«One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.» Salvador Dali
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BillWoodruff wrote: I keep waiting for the "killer" synthesis of voice recognition and (hands free) gesture recognition
They're going to first have to determine which action to take given rude gestures:
me: *flips alexa the bird for responding to something I never asked it to respond to*
alexa: *apologizes profusely and offers to clean the bathroom for the next two weeks*
like that.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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Please no voice/gestures usage as the primary method of interaction. I can type on train just fine and I can read stuff on the screen while on train. I don't even want to imagine interacting with my laptop on train via voice/gestures. Neither do I want to imagine that in an office. Or at home, actually. I guess I wouldn't be bothered about such stuff at home were I living alone, but I'm not.
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Group meetings will look like the "conjuring" scenes from the Netflix OA series.
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I ain't got a witty reply to that, please accept a "that's an awesome mental image" from me!
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is it blows our unicode tables up
What we do when we have to insert surrogate characters into UTF-32 to support another 100,000 languages?
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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honey the codewitch wrote: What we do when we have to insert surrogate characters into UTF-32 to support another 100,000 languages?
Well, we should be able to meet the requirements for a secure password ...
Obligatory Dilbert[^]
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
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Given our current spaceflight capabilities, I doubt that this will be a problem for a long time. Any and all intelligent aliens are proving their intelligence by staying a long way from Earth. 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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We have at least one already: Klingon Unicode Fonts[^]
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
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From what I think to remember is, that surrogate pairs are mostly used for special symbols and that most language symbols will fit in the base page.
It does not solve my Problem, but it answers my question
modified 19-Jan-21 21:04pm.
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That's true for earth. But wait til we add a zillion more languages which is my point =)
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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If we assume, say, 1000 characters per language, that means another 100 million characters which should not be a problem since a 32-bit range should handle 4G characters. At 1K characters per language, UTF-32 should accommodate 4M languages. That is, unless I am looking at this incorrectly which is certainly possible.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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You're probably right. There's a bunch of reserved bitfields though but yeah, even then.
Forgive me, it's early here. =)
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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Things will get really interesting if/when we encounter a civilization that does not utilize language in the written ways that we do. We might come across one that has no eyes and does not sense light. It might communicate telepathically and have no written language, only thoughts. That could be really weird.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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The working group committee on unicode already scrapped three preliminary recommendations on that. 
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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honey the codewitch wrote: What we do when we have to insert surrogate characters into UTF-32 to support another 100,000 languages?
drugs.
«One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.» Salvador Dali
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I mean, my first thought was UTF-64, but drugs? I suppose drugs could work.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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If we have a Universal Translator or Babel Fish we won't care what the original language looked like / sounds like / brain-waves like because we would hear / see / think it in our own ways, so Unicode would be overkill even for Earth languages. Then all we would need is a universal programming language if H T CW hasn't completed it first.
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Pah! The Psilon solved that issues aeons ago! 
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The emoji jungle would be finally cleared up because the Unicode guys & gals would finally got something useful to do rather than keeping themselves occupied for the sake of keeping themselves occupied.
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If you can't decide to get your child a pet or a toy for Christmas, have you considered a rattlesnake?
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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